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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. Once my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like locating the lost component that locks the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.